Date of Award

6-30-2016

Document Type

Open Access Dissertation

Department

Physics and Astronomy

First Advisor

Yordanka Ilieva

Abstract

The hyperon-nucleon (YN) interaction plays a key role in hypernuclei and strange nuclear matter and is an important part of the baryon-baryon interaction. While considerable progress has been made in the understanding of the nucleon-nucleon (NN) interaction, the YN interaction is less known. Some parameters of the YN potential can be obtained from the NN potential by using SU(3) symmetry. However, due to broken SU(3) there are parameters, which must be obtained from fits to experimental data. High-statistics data on exclusive photoproduction off the deuteron initiated with highly-polarized photons offer a unique opportunity to extract a large sample of polarization observables for final-state interaction events, which can be used to constrain hyperon-nucleon potentials. In this work, we determine the polarization transfers to the , Cx and Cz, from circularly polarized photons, and the hyperon recoil polarization, Py, for final-state interactions (FSI) in the reaction −! d ! K+−! n using data taken with the CLAS detector at the Jefferson laboratory in the E06-103 experiment. Meanwhile, Cx, Cz, and Py for K+ photoproduction off the bound proton were extracted for systematic studies and compared to published CLAS results from K+ photoproduction off a free proton. Our results cover photon energies from 0.9 GeV to 2.6 GeV, a kaon momentum range up to 2 GeV/c, a kaon polar-angle range in laboratory system from 14 to 70, a polar-angle range (relative to the three-momentum transfer to the n system) from 0 to 60, and a n invariant-mass range from 2 GeV/c2 to 2.5 GeV/c2. The FSI results are the first ever obtained for Cx, Cz, and Py and will be used to constrain the theoretical free parameters of the models of the YN potential.

Rights

© 2016, Tongtong Cao

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